Hey Reader,

This is part 3 of 4 in our series on getting buy-in for human-centred design. You can catch up on the five walls and the leader archetypes if you missed them.

For the past two weeks, I have been asking you to share your experiences of getting buy-in for HCD.

And the replies have been brilliant. Painful, funny, familiar, and full of the kind of hard-won wisdom that never makes it into conference talks.

I cannot share specifics yet. I will be in touch individually about including stories in This is Human Centered Design book. But I can share the patterns. Because certain tactics keep coming up from practitioners who have actually shifted things.

Before I get into those, I want to flag something that came through in the responses that I had not included in last week's leader archetypes. Several of you described a leader type I am now calling The Authority Leader. One practitioner, a CXO working in design, described it perfectly:

That one hit hard.

The Authority Leader is often genuinely knowledgeable. They can argue the theory. They can cite the frameworks. They can point to where your process skipped a step. And they are sometimes right about the detail while being completely wrong about the effect. Because the cumulative cost of every check, every gate, every reframe is a team that stops moving with conviction.

What the same practitioner found worked was to stop seeking their approval and start seeking their input early, on your own terms. "We would value your perspective on this before we take it wider" is very different from "we need your sign-off before we proceed." The first treats them as an expert. The second treats them as a gate. They want to be the first, although they have built a system that makes them the second.

Keep the stories coming. They are genuinely shaping this work.

Now, onto the patterns.

Share your thoughts with us Real stories from real practitioners about getting buy-in for human-centred design. Your experience could shape the book. Share story

Start with someone else's problem, not yours.

This was the single most common theme. The people who got traction stopped leading with what design needs and started leading with what operations, finance, or frontline teams were struggling with.

​Opher Yom-Tov talked about this when he described becoming the world's first Chief Design Officer at ANZ Bank. He did not walk in and ask for a design department. He made himself useful first.

One Senior UX Designer shared a story that captures this perfectly. They were brought onto a project led by an engineer who had built the product largely on personal assumptions. The previous designer had left the team in tears. Rather than confronting the situation, they spent time understanding what the engineer believed users loved about the product. They listened first. Then they planned usability tests and eye-tracking studies, inviting the team to observe sessions and see the product through real users' eyes.

The result?

They gained trust, a seat at the table, and design decisions started being guided by end-user insights rather than assumptions.

That is a deceptively simple idea. But it requires you to let go of something. You have to stop needing people to understand what you do and start showing them what you can solve. That is a different posture entirely. It means sitting in their meetings, not yours. Learning their language, not teaching them yours. Caring about their KPIs before you introduce your own.

It is not glamorous. It does not feel like "doing design." But it is the single most reliable way to build the credibility that everything else depends on.

Make the invisible visible.

Several of you described the moment things changed as the moment you put a service blueprint or journey map on a wall in a room where leaders could not avoid seeing it. Not in a presentation. Not in a PDF. On the wall.

​Patrick Quattlebaum touched on this when we spoke about how service design shapes organisations. Sometimes the act of making complexity visible is the intervention.

But here is what one UX Consultant's story reminded me - the mirror can also be turned against you. They were asked to run a service design blueprint workshop across global teams for a multinational organisation. As the work unfolded, it became clear that different teams had conflicting views of how the service actually worked. The blueprint did not fail. It revealed that the organisation itself did not share a common picture.

Instead of recognising this as an alignment issue, the incomplete blueprint was seen as a personal failure. Their engagement was ended.

That is worth sitting with.

Making the invisible visible is powerful. But you need to prepare the room for what they are about to see. If you put a mirror up without context, people do not thank you for the clarity. They blame you for the reflection.

If you are struggling to get attention, stop sending decks. Start covering walls. But before you do, make sure the people in the room understand that what they are about to see is not your opinion. It is their organisation, reflected back.

Use small wins to build permission for bigger ones.

Nobody gets organisational transformation approved in a single meeting. The practitioners who described the most progress talked about stacking small, concrete improvements over months. Each one building a little more trust, a little more credibility, a little more appetite.

You are growing something. It takes time.

The same Senior UX Designer I mentioned earlier shared another story about working in a startup where executives were initially sceptical about tactical UX research. Rather than fighting for a full research programme, they agreed to conduct usability testing under the executives' conditions, using their preferred candidates and their recruitment process. It felt controlling. But after observing the first usability test, the executives valued the methodology so much that it became embedded in the design process and secured ongoing budget.

The temptation is always to go big. To propose the transformation programme. The design maturity assessment. The organisation-wide capability build. And those things might be exactly what is needed. But proposing them before you have proven your value in small, tangible ways is like asking someone to invest in a restaurant before they have tasted the food.

Cook the food first. Let people taste it. Let them come back for more. Then talk about the restaurant.

That is how buy-in actually works. Not as a single moment of persuasion, but as a gradual accumulation of proof.

Find your translator.

Not everyone needs to understand HCD. You need one or two people in the right positions who can carry your insights into rooms you do not have access to.

Several of you described finding that person as the turning point. Sometimes it is a head of ops. Sometimes it is a programme manager. Sometimes it is someone in the CEO's office.

The translator does not need to understand your methods. They need to understand your findings and be able to articulate why they matter in a language the room already speaks. They are the bridge between your world and theirs.

Finding that person is not always obvious.

It is rarely the person with "design" or "innovation" in their title. More often, it is someone who has been in the organisation for years, understands how decisions actually get made (not how the org chart says they get made), and has enough social capital to say "we should listen to this" and be taken seriously.

Buy them a coffee. Learn what they care about. Show them something from your research that connects to their world. And let them carry it forward.

Know when to stop pushing.

This was the most honest theme. A number of you described reaching a point where the organisation simply was not ready, and the best decision was to step back, conserve energy, and wait for the right moment. Or leave.

​Jeff Gothelf talked about the realities of this on the podcast, and it connects to something I explored in "Navigating the what's the f#cking point stage of Design." Sometimes the bravest thing is knowing when to pause.

That UX Consultant's story is a case in point. They now pay more attention to readiness conditions before engaging - access to people, shared goals, agreed definitions, and realistic expectations.

Because without those, even the best methods cannot succeed. That is not defeatism. That is hard-earned wisdom.

I want to be careful here because I am not saying give up. I am saying recognise the difference between a wall you can slowly work through and a wall that is not going to move, no matter how hard you push.

Some organisations are not ready. The leadership is not there. The culture is too entrenched. The timing is wrong. And continuing to push in that context does not make you dedicated. It makes you exhausted.

Several of you described the relief of finally accepting that, either stepping back to wait for better conditions or making the difficult decision to move to an organisation with more fertile soil.

That is not failure. That is strategic. And it is something we do not talk about nearly enough in this industry.

These are not theoretical strategies. They are battle-tested by people doing this work right now, in government, in healthcare, in financial services, in tech.

And they are going into the final module of the book alongside the "if this, then that" journey I am designing. More on that next week.

There is still time to add your voice. If you have a story about what worked, what did not, or what you wish you had known earlier, hit reply. Every response helps. Yes, you can remain 100% anonymous.

Share your thoughts on this series Real stories from real practitioners about getting buy-in for human-centred design. Your experience could shape the book. Share story

One more email in this series next week. These are taking me an age to write, so apologies for the irregular cadence!

Gerry

P.S. We are growing the This is HCD Directory at www.thisishcd.com. The plan is to make it easy for organisations to find practitioners offering specific services like coaching, consultancy, research, and facilitation. If you are not listed yet, now is a good time to join.

Gerry Scullion​ Founder & Designer ​ We are building a global network of people doing human-centred work. Come add your name, learn, listen, connect and network - it's free!→ thisishcd.com/directory​

​

Our Sponsors

Why not check out their links and show them some love? If you buy from these links, we may make a small commission.